Boy Labour and Apprenticeship

by Reginald A. Bray

Take next the raising of the school age to fifteen. The age has not been raised for more than ten years, and when it was last raised it was raised without friction and without complaint on the part of the parent. We might, perhaps, have expected that the percentage of attendance would have decreased because of the difficulty of enforcing it on the children of poverty-stricken parents. This has not been the experience; indeed, the last decade has been remarkable for the rapid rise in that percentage. There is not a scrap of evidence to show that the last raising of the school age caused even temporary suffering on a large scale. Never was a large reform carried out with greater ease. There is no reason to believe that, if we raised the age again, that favourable experience would not be repeated.

We come now to the new half-time system. The earnings of boys between fifteen and eighteen years are considerable. To diminish them by one-half, it is urged, would be to adopt a course which would prove intolerable to the poor parent. Now, in the first place, though it is true that the lads could be employed for only half the time they were before, it by no means follows that they would only receive half the present money. We have already seen that the demand for boys far outruns the supply. The half-time system would halve the supply, and, though some employers might cease to use boys, the demand would certainly not be halved. The demand for boys would then considerably exceed the demand of to-day. The rate of wages would, in consequence, rise. The boys would no doubt earn less, but certainly more than half of what they now earn. In the next place, it must be remembered that the parent rarely receives the whole of the boy’s earnings even during the first year, and each year the proportion of wages that comes to the home grows less. At the age of seventeen it is seldom that more than half finds its way into the family exchequer. The boy keeps the rest, and, as we have already seen, the large amount of money he has to spend on himself is by no means an unmixed benefit. The parent cannot usually get from the boy much more than is required to keep him; indeed, he is afraid to enlarge his demand lest the boy, who is economically independent, should leave home. But under the half-time system, though he may earn his keep, he will rarely earn enough to support himself outside the family. In addition, the fact of being compelled to attend school will be a healthy reminder that he is not yet a man, and so check the growing spirit of independence. Home influence and parental authority will thus be strengthened, and the father will be able to exact a much larger share than before of the boy’s earnings. Now, if the earnings are not diminished by so much as half, and if at the same time the parent obtain an increased proportion, it is by no means clear that the home affairs will suffer. Among the poorest families, where home discipline ceases altogether when the boy leaves school, it is quite possible that the financial position of the parent will be improved rather than worsened.

But we have not yet taken into account what is, perhaps, the most important consideration. The three proposals under discussion will undoubtedly largely diminish the amount of work performed by boys, but will not diminish the amount of work that requires to be done. Somebody must take up the tasks formerly allotted to boys, and, if boys fail, men must fill their place. Now, the work was given to boys because, to give it to men would cost more. In future, the work will be given to men, and more money will be paid for it than before. In other words, the increased earnings of men will more than make up for the diminished earnings of boys, and much more than compensate for the loss, because, as we have seen, only a portion of the boys’ earnings ever reach the home. Or we may look at the question from another point of view, and say that the decreased use of boys will mean an increase in the demand for men, and, consequently, an increase in the wages of men. The Minority Report of the Poor Law Commission arrives at these three proposals by starting from the opposite point of view, and advocates their adoption not primarily for the good of the boys, but for the good of their parents. In the task of decasualizing labour, they are met with the difficulty that a considerable number of men will in the process be thrown out of employment altogether. Work must be found for them, and the easiest and the best way to find it is shown to be the withdrawal from the labour market of persons, like children, who ought not either to be employed at all or to be employed for such long hours as at present. Hence arises the suggestion of a rigid limitation of boy labour. It is much in favour of these proposals that they are the outcome of an elaborate analysis which in the one case begins with the man, and in the other with the child. We may take it, then, as clear that, from the parents’ point of view, there is nothing to hinder us in raising the school age to fifteen, prohibiting the employment of school-children, and instituting a new half-time system.

II.

Training.

The second essential in an apprenticeship system worthy the name is the provision of adequate training. The word “training” is used in its broadest sense to include preparation, not only for the life of the workman, but for the life of the citizen as well. In the preceding chapter we have seen that the scholarship schemes, connecting the elementary school with the University, and rapidly increasing throughout the country, are offering opportunities of training for those likely to rise high in the professional, the commercial, and the industrial world. It is probable that sufficient attention has not as yet been given to the supply of the most advanced kind of technological instruction, but the fault is being remedied, and the defect is due rather to lack of knowledge than to lack of will; and it is the instruction, and not the facilities of access to it, that is wanting.

What we are concerned with in this chapter is the training of those destined to fill the posts of foremen and managers of small undertakings, of the skilled workmen of the future, and of those never likely to rise above the ranks of unskilled labour. We are also concerned with those who will occupy corresponding positions in the commercial world. It has already been shown that the training of these persons is one-sided and inadequate, and, in the case of the majority, can hardly be said to exist at all. On the other hand, we have seen good reason to believe that the technical school can be, if not a complete substitute for the workshop, at any rate a necessary and fitting supplement. The day has gone by when it was necessary to argue at length the uses of technical instruction. Employers in this country, as they have long since done on the Continent and in America, recognize the advantages. Yearly, whether by compelling the lads in their service to attend the technical school, or forming themselves into committees to advise as to the most desirable methods of teaching, they are displaying a keener interest in the question, and a fuller faith in the possibilities of practical training given outside the walls of the workshop.

The defect of existing arrangements has been shown to lie in their limitation. For the majority technical instruction has been unsatisfactory or impossible of access. We must show in the present chapter how all may enjoy the advantages of training; but before doing so we must consider, a little more closely than has been done before, the kind of training required by the petty officers and the rank and file of the industrial army.

In much of the preceding discussion it has been assumed that what the man wants is an all-round training. This is undoubtedly a fact, but by an all-round training is not necessarily meant a training that will produce a craftsman of the old school, equally capable of turning his hand successfully to any of the operations with which his trade is concerned. Except in rural districts, in a few of the artistic crafts, and in certain branches of repairing work, a man of this kind is not generally required. It seems probable that the industrial tendencies of to-day are making decreasing demands for purely manual skill. The Report of the Poor Law Commission contains a valuable discussion of the question, and sums up the conclusions in the following passage: “The general trend of our answers was that the ‘skill’ of modern industry is scarcely comparable with the skill of labour in the past. One might say that, within twenty years, with the universal employment of machinery and the excessive subdivision and specialization of its use, the character of the productive process has quite changed. There is a growing demand for higher intelligence on the part of the few; a large and probably growing demand for specialized machine-minders; and, unhappily, a relegation of those who cannot adapt themselves to a quite inferior, if not worse paid, position. If, then, the ‘skill’ which we might have looked for and desired is what might be called ‘craftsmanship,’ we must conclude that the demand for skill is, on the whole, declining. The all-round ability which used honourably to mark out the mechanic is no longer in demand, so much as the work of the highly specialized machine-minder.”[179] But if there seems a less demand for all-round skill, there appears to be an increasing demand for trained intelligence. “In the greater industries employing adult male labour, ‘machinery’ does not in the least resemble the long lines of revolving spindles one sees in a cotton mill. In the machine tools of an engineering shop there is comparatively little of such automatism, and, even where the machines are automatic, single men are put in charge of a number of machines, and the setting and supervising of these is work probably demanding a higher level of intelligence than ever before. ‘I should say the skilled men require even more skill than they did,’ says Mr. Barnes, ‘because of the finer work and more intricate machinery.... Side by side with automatic machines there has come about more intricate and highly complicated machinery.’ ‘The semi-skilled of to-day,’ says Sir Benjamin C. Brown, ‘is in many cases as good as the skilled was a quarter of a century ago.’”[180] Or, as another witness puts it: “The tendency of machinery is always to cause a substitution of intelligence for dexterity, the person who was in effect a machine by reason of his dexterity giving place to one who could understand a direct and mechanical process.”[181] There seems also good reason to believe that the demand for intelligence outruns the supply.

In the workmen, usually classed as skilled, the employer requires intelligence, but he wants something more; he wants trustworthiness, and frequently a certain highly specialized manual dexterity. The training of the workshop can supply the third of these qualifications; it cannot, however, supply the other two, which are in the main the products of education. But between the second and the third there is a certain antagonism. Monotony in the workshop does not cultivate intelligence; it is actively hostile to such growth. Unless there is a well-trained intelligence to begin with, the continual performance of a single task will reduce the man to the level of a mere machine. Now, the employer does not want a mere machine; if he did, in these days of inventive genius, he would soon discover something more reliable in the way of machines than flesh and blood. He wants a machine with intelligence; he must therefore have a man. But the intelligence must rest on a broad basis of education, or the machine element will prove too much for it. This is the reason of the statement, found so often in evidence on technical training given by enlightened employers, that what is mostly required is a good general education.